As Turner Classic Movies continues to play the Oscar hits all month long, last night I watched The Caine Mutiny and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?. The latter I’d seen before and love, but this was my first visit with the former and while I’m sure it has been said before, the comparisons to Aaron Sorkin‘s screenplay for A Few Good Men are bountiful once you get to the third act court-martial of Lieutenant Steve Maryk (Van Johnson) and Ensign Keith (Robert Francis), charged with conspiring to mutiny.
The charges aren’t the same as those facing the two U.S. Marines in A Few Good Men and this is obviously the Navy we’re dealing with, not the Marines, but the structure of the trial and in particular, the questioning of Humphrey Bogart‘s Lieutenant Commander Queeg is so similar it’s impossible to miss.
Before he begins his questioning of Queeg, José Ferrer, as Lieutenant Greenwald, is reminded he’s questioning a high ranking officer, there’s a threat of bringing in two officers to contradict Queeg’s testimony (you remember Airmen O’Malley and Rodriguez right?) and then there’s Queeg’s insistence on the sub-standard nature of many of the members of his crew. These all bear resemblance to Tom Cruise‘s questioning of Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in A Few Good Men, but there’s one major difference…
The great difference is in the performances of Bogart versus the snarling nature of Nicholson’s Jessup. In A Few Good Men Sorkin never offers an opportunity for us to like or feel compassion for Jessup, while Stanley Roberts and Michael Blankfort‘s screenplay for The Caine Mutiny, based on the 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, coupled with Bogart’s performance creates a character that’s easy to dislike, though by the film’s ending you begin to question that hatred while A Few Good Men leaves you with no such questions.
Unfortunately the full trial scene from Caine isn’t available online and I couldn’t find the scene featuring Greenwald’s dressing down of the men as they celebrated the trial’s results, but it’s certainly a scene that makes you wonder if A Few Good Men would have been even better had Sorkin not presented such a distasteful image of Jessup.
Perhaps it’s a testimony to Nicholson’s delivery of “You can’t handle the truth!” that the fact he follows that up with, “[M]y existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives,” is overshadowed as that now-iconic exclamation is still echoing through the courtroom. As great as Nicholson is, would the film have been better served by an actor that could gain a little more of your compassion? Imagine if “You can’t handle the truth!” had been delivered with a sense of sadness and the following lines with glassy-eyed emotion.
By the end of A Few Good Men we’re left to question whether the actions of Privates Dawson and Downey were correct. Dawson essentially tells us the moral of Sorkin’s story saying, “We were supposed to fight for people who couldn’t fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willy.” While certainly true, it would have been interesting if by the film’s end we were not only nodding our heads in agreement with that statement, but also in the back of our minds wondering if Jessup had been treated fairly and if he possibly deserved to go back to his command. Of course, by the time Jessup says, “I’m gonna rip the eyes out of your head and piss into your dead skull! You fucked with the wrong Marine!” we’re pretty much convinced he deserves a little down time. Meanwhile, Queeg keeps spinning those silver marbles in his hands while his accusers look on in silence creating a far different scenario in Caine.
While I can’t say I entirely loved The Caine Mutiny, I appreciate the fact it offers a new way of looking at characters in film. We’re inclined to judge a character immediately, and films count on this or third act reveals wouldn’t be as “shocking”. Had I looked at Queeg’s request for help (watch above) as strength rather than weakness I wonder how the the rest of the film would have played.
[yt id=”-95QqBXLG2I” width=”610″]
[yt id=”nyKJeXDoqnw” width=”610″]
